Year 17

Some people say “the art spoke to me,” but how often do they say, “the art made me speak”?

That’s how I felt about this week’s Black Panther & The Crew #1. My original plan was to give this new Ta-Nehisi Coates and Butch Guice Black Panther spinoff a quick read and a one paragraph review as part of keeping up with new Marvel titles.

I had no concept of how incredibly strong and thought-provoking of a comic it would be. In that regard, it feels of a piece with the nuanced first half of Netflix’s Luke Cage. The issue was so layered and powerful that words started spilling out of me before I could even finish reading. I was desperate to unpack all the thematic content. I couldn’t stop talking about it on Twitter, Facebook, or in the house with E.

As a result, this is as much as review as an attempt to identify and parse the several layers of identity and privilege in this story.

I’m a white man writing about a comic by a black writer about black women and their community. I make no pretense that I’ve got the right, best, or even relevant take on the issue – but, this comic moved me, and I think it’s a mistake not to write about art when it makes you speak.

I’m probably going to get some things wrong. I offer my apology in advance for that, and I’ll offer it again in specific if you point out where I am mistaken.

(I also offer this: It’s no one’s job to tell me how or why I’m wrong. If you are a black woman and you have a counterpoint to offer, please say so in a comment. You don’t have to offer your take for free. If you don’t have your own platform to publish on, I’ll get in touch to offer you a small stipend in exchange for featuring your commentary as a response here on the CK main page.)

One of the best parts of this comic is yet to come. No, not the appearances of Black Panther and Luke Cage. The even-numbered issues of The Crew will be scripted by poet Yona Harvey – one of the few times Storm has ever been written by a woman, and the first in-continuity arc with her written by a black woman. Ever.

Written by Ta-Nehisi Coates with pencils by Butch Guice, inks by Scott Hanna, color art by Dan Brown, and letters by VC’s Joe Sabino. Cover by John Cassaday with Laura Martin.

Black Panther & The Crew #1 is dense with symbolism and thematic content, deliberately using its visual medium to create juxtapositions that would take many more pages to work through in a prose version of the story.

I haven’t yet read Black Panther by National Book Award winner and Atlantic correspondent Ta-Nehisi Coates, but the first issue of Black Panther & The Crew tells me I need to go back and catch up immediately.

I don’t know why this comic’s unwieldy title can’t just be “Misty Knight,” but I’m not going to look a gift horse in the mouth. Black Panther never appears. Coates uses Misty as a narrator to great effect, forcing the reader to pause to absorb the panel work as her narrated story frequently departs from the action we see in the art. Maybe the point-of-view character will rotate as the series progresses.

Misty’s story is really the story of Harlem, and of Ezra Keith. Keith is a former costumed crime fighter turned into a frequent anti-police protestor, though Misty has only put the connection together recently.

While Misty’s thoughts are on Keith’s case, Butch Guice’s artwork is elsewhere – first depicting a flashback of Keith leading his own Crew (called “The Crusade”) in 1957 and then showing Misty wading through a crowd of present day protestors as they clash with both local police and state-issued police-bots.

It’s not until Misty meets with Storm later in the issue that her thoughts and the images line up. It’s a powerful choice to snap the story fully into the present tense at that moment, even before Misty and Storm exchange their first words. It sets them up as peers, black women, community members, and heroes – but each with her own distinct stack of privilege acting as a filter.

Misty feels a connection to the community and their protests, but can’t help but keep them at a bionic arm’s length. When she sees something amiss in the death of an elderly citizen, her first instinct isn’t to protest or offer counsel.

Instead, she investigates.

The issue treads a careful line of whether that’s due to her skill as a detective or if it is her privilege as both police and superhero to enjoy a detachment from the immediacy of state-sanctioned violence against her community. The violence angers and disappoints her, but she can wade through a police line to visit the other side with impunity – at least, for now.

The comic is less equivocal on how that privilege is also double-edged sword. It’s hard for Misty to relate to her fellow officers, both as a member of the community and as a superhero. Misty has tried being a member of the community the police serve, a member of the police force, and someone stronger than them all, but no matter what role she takes on she endures a litany of micro-aggressions reminding her she’ll never really be just one of the cops again.

Today I woke up late, skipped my breakfast and run to barely make it to the gym with EV in tow, returned home to read to her and practiced our French, and managed to serve us both a fresh lunch while planning out meals for the week.

I’m exhausted.

I don’t want to be writing a blog post. I want to be laying in the middle of the floor and falling asleep while watching Drag Race.

Yet, here I am. That’s because, while my frequent mantra of achievement may be “WWMD?“, when it comes to the words that motivate me to make it through my day it’s not Madonna I turn to.

It’s Sheryl Crow.

Those words are from “It Don’t Hurt,” a rather marginal, Dylanesque single from Crow’s third LP, The Globe Sessions. It’s a song about fooling yourself into feeling something.

The electric man looks good today
Maybe not, well I’m trying hard
Trying hard to feel that way
The electric man’s a good place to start

Stick with me for a minute here. This is about more than fucking the electric man, but it’s absolutely about arousal.

Sometimes nothing feels good. You don’t have to suffer from clinical depression to feel that way. Maybe you’re exhausted. Maybe you’re bored. Maybe you’re heartbroken. Maybe it’s just one of those days when your brain feels completely drained of all intent and motivation. A lying the middle of the floor sort of day. A playing idle games to pass the time sort of day.

No one can be Madonna – or, to use a more modern example, Beyoncé – every minute of every day. Especially because we don’t have massive empires to take care of things like our meals, our laundry, and our taxes.

On those days when I can’t get up the interest in anything, I think about Sheryl Crow and those lyrics.

The electric man was not looking particularly good that day. He might not have ever looked good. Not to her, anyway. Maybe even if he did look good he didn’t look good to her because he’s the exact opposite of her type – too thin and wiry if she likes a muscular guy, or too short and stout if she likes her men tall and long-limbed.

It doesn’t matter. She is going to convince herself the electrician looks good. She is going to to subvert the flow of the chemicals in her body, little hits of dopamine, and instruct her brain to get interested in the electric man as he squats low to repair a broken outlet.

She’ll do it because you have to start somewhere, sometime. You have to put your stake in the ground at some point, and no one patch of sand is better than the next. If the electric man is in front of you, you go with the electric man. Maybe if you can feel aroused looking at him you can feel aroused about something you really care about.

I use the electric man litmus test on myself when I am feeling hopelessly listless. Can I get excited about something utterly mundane? Can I throw myself into organizing our DVDs or building an awesome race track with EV? Can I find a little passion in my body for something inane, since I can’t seem to summon it for something important.

The answer isn’t always yes. That’s fine. We’re in command of our bodies, but we’re not always in total control of those chemicals in our brains. If we can’t get excited about the electric man, maybe we’re missing something – a bite to eat, some more sleep, or even intervention from a professional.

But if you can get aroused over that electric man then, damnit, you know you can find your way back to your passion.

Was the thing I was most looking forward to today writing a blog post about a Sheryl Crow song I don’t even really like all that much? No. Yet I’ve been meaning to write a post about that specific verse for at least three years now. Now that I have, my listless brain is awake and alive and I’ve managed achieve something.

This post makes me absolutely giddy with joy: I’m debuting a song by my favorite band in Philly, who I also interviewed for this post, and if you buy it all the proceeds go straight to Women’s Law Project.

If You Harden On The Inside by Hezekiah JonesHezekiah Jones is the folk collective formed by and around Philly-based songwriter Raphael Cutrufello. He pulls a peculiar double-duty while fronting the band, acting the entire time as Hezekiah, with each one of the band’s rotating cast of musicians presenting themselves as another fictional member of the Jones clan.

(My favorite: Dow Jones.)

That little touch of mythology goes a long way to contextualizing Cutrufello’s songwriting. When you hear Hezekiah Jones’ music, you have the profound sense that a weird band of back-country geniuses have briefly descended from their cloistered home on a hill to play for you, like a roving band of thespians in Shakespeare.

(It may be a hill in an alternate timeline.)

The songs are full of piercing observations on the human condition, always tinged with optimism. There’s also a smattering of details that place them in a vaguely post-apocalyptic landscape full of endless roiling wars and the Mississippi river expanded out to a sea.

Hezekiah Jones, photographed by Lisa Schaffer.

“If You Harden On The Inside” could easily be a handclaps-and-harmony 60s pop song if it was dressed up with a full band arrangement. Instead, a whimsical chorus of Hezekiahs sings “blah blah blah” as backing to the track, later joined by a swell of electric pianos. As the song whirrs to life with its halting rhythm it gives serious vibes of Dirty Projectors.

Cutrufello AKA Jones plays everything on this track save for drums by Daniel Bower (AKA Roy G. Biv Jones) and bass by Philip D’Agostino (AKA Pepe Jones), a Philly music scene legend and touring member of Get The Led Out.

Half your saints
Are playing video games
Or they’re out doing meth
Or too depressed to get out of bed

All these bodies
What a delicate make
If you harden on the inside
You’ll be easy to break

If someone
Gave into love
Their guard would be down
We could steal all their stuff

She not only pretends that she fronts a band, but actually writes songs for that band, rehearses them, and then sings them to us. She’s also got pretty solid pitch, can memorize most lyrics after two practice runs, and has started singing harmony to my originals when I play them for her.

She has a pair of musical parents, and has already sat in on dozens of rehearsals, but I like to think all of her musical interest and acumen is down to one song: “Madness” by Muse.

I’ve enjoyed Muse ever since I first heard an a cappella group sing “Time Is Running Out” back in college. There’s something about Matthew Bellamy’s rangy voice and the Queen-like bombast of their biggest songs that draws me in.

As with Kings of Leon, I continued to follow Muse’s releases oblivious to the fact that they were turning into the most popular band in the land. Their sixth studio album, The 2nd Law, came out on September 28th and I was already sure that I liked it when I heard “Madness” on the radio for the first time on Sunday, November 18th, on its way to being the longest-running Alternative Rock number one song of all time.

I remember the day, because that was the day we learned we were pregnant with EV. We were driving back home from seeing our friend Gina (not that one, the other one) in a play and the song came on the radio. We both sang along and traded the vocal percussion back and forth, smiled giddily at the “some kind of madness” that was about to take control of our lives.

After that car ride, Muse’s omnipresent “Madness” became the secret anthem of our pregnancy.

When we arrived at the hospital to deliver EV nine months later, we were met by one of the older midwives from the group of six we had been seeing. She was an authoritarian hippy, easy-going and new age-y but able and ready to command us at a moment’s notice. I know I wasn’t the pregnant one, but that’s pretty much everything I was looking for in a midwife.

Unfortunately, her hours of coverage were up midway through E’s labor. Just as we were getting comfortable with her, she was replaced with a young midwife who we’d only met once before. We were a bit bummed. How had we spent all these months forging relationships with a group of women who would deliver our child and missed getting to know the one who’d actually do the delivering.

The bummedness didn’t last long.

The midwife’s name was Erin, another E-name in a room with E and an nurse named Elizabeth and, potentially, a little E-named baby, if our baby turned out to be a girl.

Erin shared E’s birthday – not just the day, but the year as well.

Finally – and to this day, I find this last coincidental detail utterly insane – like E, Erin sang in a semi-professional a capella group.

Erin was meant to delivery EV. It was all part of the madness.

The first image of her I recorded somewhere other than in my gray matter. She is about 15 minutes old.

E and I had joked for a long time that she wanted the rocking soundtrack to Supernatural Season One playing throughout the entirety of her labor, but as the evening progressed I noticed she simply wasn’t getting into a good zone listening to all that classic rock.

The first time “Madness” came on she went into a sort of trance. I played it again and reflexively began singing the “mm-mm-mm-ma madness” part under my breath. Then, Erin began to sing along in harmony. Then, to our surprise, E began to sing too, quietly, between her contractions.

Almost every other moment of the labor process is a blur of details to me until EV emerged, but that moment remains frozen in time in that way all of my most significant memories are – where I can see it happen as an omniscient 3rd-person narrator looking in on the scene over my own shoulder.

Music. “Madness.” EV incubated in it for nine months, us singing along to it in the kitchen, trading the vocal percussion back and forth, and it summoned her into this world.

The Format was one of my favorite bands. You’ve probably never heard of them, yet they still so sound familiar to you. Why is that? Because The Format’s lead singer was Nate Ruess, the elastic-voiced lead singer of the band fun. and guest-vocalist on the Pink duet on “Just Give Me a Reason.”

I’m obsessed with Ruess’s extraordinary rubber band voice. Not only does he have a tremendously large range, not only does he have that androgynous mixed-voice tone I’m obsessed with, but his pitch is impeccable.

I always assumed they auto-tuned the heck out of him to get the perfectly round, ringing sound from his falsetto even as he swoops grandly from note to note. I’ve now seen enough live clips to think he’s the real deal (plus, I asked him about it one time on Twitter and he swore that it was without digital tuning).

The Format’s 2006 LP Dog Problems gives me butterflies in my stomach for the entirety of each listen thanks to the resonance of its lyrics and the peculiar sonic palette of indie dance pop with the occasional show tune influence, but if I had to choose one song from the album to leave on an endless loop it would be “She Doesn’t Get It.”

“She Doesn’t Get It” is a song built on surprisingly simple bones, with the intro and verse built on the barest sketch of an endlessly repeating e-g(/d#)-c#-g(/d#) figure. The band spins it up into something more intricate, with frantic hi-hat rides, chiming high guitar riffs, and ringing bells.

There are so many layers to unpeel in this narrative about being the odd one out, the oldest soul in a crowd. That’s the story on the surface, but underneath there’s something deeper about the nature of reality and how we choose to consume it. While his friends are all out to enjoy themselves, all Nate can see is the same dull trends rubber-stamped across the group.

All the girls pose the same for pictures
All the boys got the same girls’ hair
I am bored ’cause I feel much older
Look at me, as if I’ve got a reason to stare

He’s a sort of intellectually-elderly ugly duckling who can foresee the conclusion at each fumbling attempt at a relationship before they even begin, yet he keeps falling for the same types of girl because he knows exactly what type of guy they want. But, it’s not just any girl that he wants – it’s the one who’s about to go away.

She says she’s leaving on a Sunday
That leaves me one more night
Can I take you home?
I know it’s wrong
but I know your type

Lindsay, Erika, and I formed an only-child club together in 2001, but its origins were in 1999 and 2000.

That’s when five of the more senior members of The Drexel Players – Erika, Kate, Laurel, Megan, and Anthony – all shared the top two floors of an old row home at 3418 Race Street. For all of us Freshman, it’s where we decamped after every informational meeting, audition, and rehearsal. It’s where I met so many of the friends I still hold dear today, and where I met my entire wedding party (aside from Gina, who still factors into this tale).

There were certain records that never left the CD spinner in that house, such that their songs have become synonymous with one or more of those people for me. (Yes, CD spinner, though we were into into the heyday of Napster at this point.). Some of the records were the stereotypical white college kid things you’d expect – Dave Matthews was a frequent play, especially his Live at Luther College with Tim Reynolds.

Perhaps influenced by that choice, there was also Guster’s Lost and Gone Forever, produced by longtime DMB collaborator Steve Lillywhite.

Sometimes when I hear an album for the first time it seems so melodically obvious that I cannot believe I haven’t heard it before. Other times an album is so perfect that I consider every song a slice of 5-star perfection and can listen to it endlessly.

Lost and Gone Forever is both.

There aren’t a lot of catchy, pop-oriented bands that break through mostly on the power of acoustic guitars and harmony, which is the trick Guster somehow pulls on songs like “Center of Attention.” The amount and intricacy of Ryan Miller and Adam Gardner’s harmony is really quite incredible. It hardly ever sticks to the straight thirds most bands plaster their songs with. At points they’re what I’d call the nearest male analog to The Indigo Girls.

“Center of Attention” doesn’t really use any chords. Listen carefully in the first verse as it reaches the “walls inside my head” prechorus. It’s just a pair of riffs churning against each other to imply tonality. It’s also a perfect example of how Guster eschews the typical rhythm section of drums and bass, with most songs rooted by a baritone-range guitar figure and drummer Brian Rosenworcel pounding on all manner of congos, bongos, and even typewriters.

That doesn’t sound like it should make for great, catchy pop music and honestly it didn’t on Guster’s first two records. However, the combination of Steve Lillywhite as a producer and this remarkable set of songs created a whole that you could have never predicted by looking at the parts.

Lost and Gone Forever is an amazing record about the changing nature of friendship and platonic love, about selfishness and getting over yourself, and you can sing along to every song on it.

One of us won’t last the night
Between you and me it’s no surprise
There’s two of us, both can’t be right
Neither will move till it’s over

I’m the center of attention
and the wall’s inside my head
And no one will ever know it
if I keep my mouth shut tight

The that motley crew of Drexel Players I met Freshman year shifted in 2000-2001 as I started this blog. Three members of the house moved away, which is how at one point Lindsay came to be renting Laurel’s back bedroom, and I came to be sitting around in the middle of the day with her and Erika watching game shows.

Just as there aren’t many memorable acoustic pop bands like Guster, there aren’t a lot of great, catchy songs about the mental defenses you construct as a clever only-child. “Center of Attention” is, without a doubt, the only-child’s anthem in that regard. I’d say, “maybe that’s just me,” but Lindsay and Erika have proven that it’s not. You’re not only your own protagonist, as every child is, but all of your adventures are entirely contained in the gossamer bubble of your brain.

Somehow (and I honestly still can’t quite explain it, even with copious posts from the time to aid my memory), the three of us wound up renting a house together in the fall of 2001. Three only children, each as selfish and stubborn as the other, all holed up in the top two floors of our own apartment on 44th street (where we’d later be joined by a fourth only-child (sort of), Gina)).

My own little world is what I deserve
Cause I am the only child there is
I’m king of it all, the belle of the ball
I promise I’ve always been like this
Forever the first, my bubble can’t burst
It’s almost like only I exist
Where everything’s fine
If I can keep my mouth shut tight, tight, tight

I think the reason we found each other and became (and remained) so close is because we’d each tried to outlast each other through the night and failed. Once that defense is finally knocked down, you’ve found someone with whom who you don’t always have to keep your mouth shut so tight.

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